Essential stories from Fast Company for the week of January 22-26

Welcome to Fast Company Digest. Essential stories from tech, design, impact and work life. Narrated by Noah App I'm Fast Company Deputy Editor and host of the new Way We Work podcast, Kathleen Davis. Here are this week's stories. First, it's not just your imagination Google search results are getting worse A team of German researchers googled over 7,000 search terms once a week for a year, and they say the site, which is responsible for 90% of all search queries worldwide, does indeed appear to be losing the war against spam.

For Noah. This is Martin Buchanan reading from Fast company, where on 18 January 2024, Clint Rainey writes, Is Google getting worse? This is what leading computer scientists say. You've heard this claim before, but a new study lends academic credence to the common refrain that Google is getting worse. For a paper that's being presented at March's European Conference on Information Retrieval, a team of German researchers googled some 7,392 search terms once a week for a year. And they say the site, which is responsible for 90% of all search queries worldwide, does indeed appear to be losing the war against low quality SEO spam. Internet users have complained about the supposedly decreasing quality of search results for years, they write, adding it is often attributed to an increasing amount of search engine optimized but low quality content. Until now, proof has been largely anecdotal, though nobody has ever argued it was unreasonable to blame Google's online marketing strategies for this decline. Their paper set out to systematically investigate for the first time whether and to which degree Google is getting worse by studying changes in search results over the course of a year. They compared Google to Bing and DuckDuckGo as well, and the findings showed that on average, higher ranked pages are more optimized, more monetized with affiliate marketing, and show signs of lower text quality. Furthermore, they contend, it's unclear what Earth's search superpower can do to thwart this trend. Spam sites succeed by gaming the system. Even if Google tweets its algorithm to demote bad actors, this proves to be a stopgap that only has a temporary positive effect, the paper states, because the spam sites are constantly finding creative new ways to climb back up in the rankings. It's a constant battle, the authors say, of search engines losing a cat and mouse game that is SEO spam. In a statement, Google told Fast Company this specific study only looked narrowly at products review content, which meant it missed the overall quality and helpfulness of search for the billions of queries we see every day a spokesperson added. The company also continues to prioritize reducing unoriginal, low quality content, which identifies partly through the feedback of users who report websites in search results that are unhelpful. Still, who hasn't Googled something seemingly straightforward only for Google to crowd the screen with a sea of sponsored links, its experimental new generative AI feature, and that big befuddling interactive people also ask box. Those obstacles to combing through organic search results were outside the scope of the study, which instead jump directly into assessing the quality of results themselves. Yet starting from even that narrower focus, the authors write, a torrent of low quality content, especially for product search, keeps drowning any kind of useful information in search results. Proclamations that Google is getting worse are ancient by this point in Internet years, people have claimed to observe Google searches decline ever since paid advertisements began pushing the list of blue hyperlinks further down the page page. The search for healthy toddler snacks is overloaded with sponsored product placement prompts to engage with more questions. How do you fill a hungry toddler? Meat and seafood bring on the meat and endless keyword engorged content, charlie Warzel wrote in a recent Atlantic piece called the Tragedy of Google Search. Using Google once felt like magic, he added, and now it's more like rifling through junk mail, dodging scams and generic mailers. Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer, an ex Googler herself, explained in 2022 that if Google search has gotten worse, it's because the Internet has too. Whether they agree or not, others argue the search engine is buckling under all this pressure, yielding results that may oscillate between unhelpful and outright inaccurate and inspiring a search habit where some users even started appending Reddit in hopes of improving their results. The study's researchers acknowledge that Google typically outperformed the other search engines. But as they put it, there is still quite a lot of room for improvement, especially with AI generated content growing into more of a norm. They warn, the line between benign content and spam will become increasingly blurry under AI an infinite spout of deep fakes, artificial images and and chatbot text. Just this past September, the top Google search result for the 1989 photo of Dianamin Square's iconic tankman was a fake image created by AI, which showed him preoccupied with snapping a selfie. You are listening to Fast Company, where Clint Raney writes, is Google getting worse? This is what leading computer scientists say. This article was published on 18 January 2024 and was read by Martin Buchanan.

For Noah and next we may have been thinking about the cost of the global transition to clean energy all wrong. A new analysis shows the cost may be a lot lower than popular calculations, lower to the tune of trillions or even tens of trillions of dollars. The reason Most estimates don't fully take into account the decrease in fossil fuel spending.

For NOAA, this is Sam Scholl reading from Vast Company, where on 21 January 2022, Dan Guerino writes. How much will the clean energy transition cost? Not as much as you think. One analysis says the global transition to clean energy has a cost, but it may be a lot lower than the figures that sometimes get thrown around. The differences are large, amounting to trillions and even tens of trillions of dollars. A new analysis from rmi, the clean energy research and advocacy group, identifies what its authors say is a basic flaw in many of those estimates. They don't fully take into account the decrease in fossil fuel spending. This kind of narrative that there's a massive surge in capital that's required is simply incorrect, said Kingsmill Bond, a co author of the report and an analyst for rmi, whose work covers the financial side of the energy transition. The report finds that global capital spending money used for equipment and property, among other things, on energy supply is on track to be about $2.5 trillion in 2030, up from $2.2 trillion in 2023. It's 2% per annum growth, bond said. On a net basis, it's not much. The RMI analysis doesn't take into account any of the financial benefits of limiting the harm of climate change, such as reduction in heat, related medical issues and property damage. The report serves as a counterpoint to estimates from organizations including McKinsey & Co. And the International Energy Agency. McKinsey, the management consulting firm, said in a 2022 report that spending on energy and land use systems in the net zero transition would cost an average of $9.2 trillion per year between 2021 and and 2050, which is an annual increase of about $3.5 trillion per year from what was then the current spending level. McKinsey's authors noted that this increase would be the equivalent of half of global corporate profits and one quarter of global tax revenue. That sounds scary, and it's misleading, according to Bond. McKinsey is making an unfair comparison, he said, because the global economy and energy spending are both growing and would grow regardless of whether the system was based on fossil fuels or not. A fairer comparison would be between an economy aiming for net zero emissions and one with a business as usual scenario with a slower transition to clean energy, he said. McKinsey includes this kind of comparison later in its report showing that the average annual increase for a net zero scenario is about $1 trillion per year. McKinsey did not respond to a request for comment. IEA says that capital's spending on Energy was $2.8 trillion in 2023 and will rise to more than $4 trillion in 2030 under the net zero emissions scenario, which is one of the several scenarios in its World Energy Outlook. Paris based IEA does research to help its 31 member countries, including the United States, plan and manage to meet their energy needs. Bond and his co authors argue that IEA is misleading in its estimates because it is lumping together several categories of capital costs, some of which are more appropriate to include than others. I asked IEA for a response. It's a bit difficult to respond as many of the points are unclear or couched quite vaguely, said Tim Gould, I, IEA's chief energy economist, in an email. He said IEA clearly accounts for declines in fossil fuel capital spending, so he thinks this aspect of RMI's critique is misplaced. The clash is largely about how those declines are calculated and communicated. I can see what RMI is saying and can also understand why IEA is confident in its approach. It is important to specify that RMI's report uses IEA spending estimates as the basis of its analysis, so the two have a lot in common. The difference is that RMI is making what the authors say are justified adjustments to IEA's numbers as part of a larger argument that a decline in fossil fuel spending should be viewed as reducing the cost of the energy transition. I find Bond's way of framing this topic to be compelling, including the idea that the world has more than enough money to pay for a rapid transition. But there are some shortcomings in speaking so broadly about a shift whose pace will vary a lot by country and region. The report acknowledges that there is a lack of available data to estimate costs in emerging markets like regions within Africa. If the transition in those places is unusually slow and expensive, it could undercut the main thrust of the report's argument. Bond said he and others at RMI are working to get a better handle on costs in the places where this information is often lacking. One of my main takeaways from this report is that the transition to clean energy is not some strange thing with astronomical costs that should be feared. It's the track we're already on. The key question is not the destination, but how quickly we will get there. Fossil fuel companies have a lot to gain from a slow transition, and that's what animates much of the discussion we're having and will continue to have. You were listening to Fast Company, where Dan Guarino writes, how much will the clean energy transition cost? Not as much as you think, one analysis says. This article was published on 21 January 2024 and was read by Sam Scholl for.